Farmer in the Sky

18. Pioneer Party

We all lived in Peggy's room until Dad and I had the seeds in, then we built on to it, quake proof this time and with a big view window facing the lake and another facing the mountains. We knocked a window in Peggy's room, too; it made it seem like a different place.

We built on still another room presently, as it seemed as if we might be needing it. All the rooms had windows and the living room had a fireplace.

Dad and I were terribly busy the second season after the quake. Enough seed could be had by then and we farmed the empty farm across the road from us. Then some newcomers, the Ellises, moved in and paid us for the crop. It was just what they call a "book transaction," but it reduced our debt with the Commission.

Two G-years after the line up you would never have known that anything had happened. There wasn't a wrecked building in the community, there were better than forty-five thousand people, and the town was booming. New people were coming in so fast that you could even sell some produce to the Commission in lieu of land.

We weren't doing so badly, ourselves. We had a hive of bees. We had Mabel II, and Margie and Mamie, and I was sending the spare milk into town by the city transport truck that passed down our road once a day. I had broken Marge and Mamie to the yoke and used them for ploughing as well—we had crushed five more acres—and we were even talking about getting a horse.

Some people had horses already, the Schultzes for instance. The council had wrangled about it before okaying the "invasion," with conservatives holding out for tractors. But we weren't equipped to manufacture tractors yet and the policy was to make the planet self-sufficient—the hay burners won out. Horses can manufacture more horses and that is one trick that tractors have never learned.

Furthermore, though I would have turned my nose up at the idea when I was a ground hog back in Diego Borough, horse steak is very tasty.

It turned out we did need the extra room. Twins— both boys. New babies don't look as if they were worth keeping, but they get over it—slowly. I bought a crib as a present for them, made right here on Ganymede, out of glass fabric stuck together with synthetic resin. It was getting possible to buy quite a number of home products.

I told Molly I would initiate the brats into the Cubs when they were old enough. I was getting in to meetings oftener now, for I had a patrol again—the Daniel Boone patrol, mostly new kids. I still hadn't taken my own tests but you can't do everything at once. Once I was scheduled to take them and a litter of pigs picked that day to arrive. But I planned to take them; I wanted to be an Eagle Scout again, even if I was getting a little old to worry about badges in themselves.

It may sound as if the survivors didn't give a hoot about those who had died in the disaster. But that isn't the truth. It was just that you work from day to day and that keeps your mind busy. In any case, we weren't the first colony to be two-thirds wiped out— and we wouldn't be the last. You can grieve only so much; after that it's self pity. So George says.

George still wanted me to go back to Earth to finish my education and I had been toying with the idea myself. I was beginning to realize that there were a few things I hadn't learned. The idea was attractive; it would not be like going back right after the quake, tail between my legs. I'd be a property owner, paying my own way. The fare was considerable—five acres—and would about clean me out, my half, and put a load on George and Molly. But they were both for it.

Besides, Dad owned blocked assets back Earthside which would pay my way through school. They were no use to him otherwise; the only thing the Commission will accept as pay for imports is proved land. There was even a possibility, if the council won a suit pending back Earthside, that his blocked assets could be used for my fare as well and not cost us a square foot of improved soil. All in all, it was nothing to turn down idly.

We were talking about me leaving on the New Ark when another matter came up—the planetary survey.

Ganymede had to have settlements other than Leda; that was evident even when we landed. The Commission planned to set up two more ports-of-entry near the two new power stations and let the place grow from three centers. The present colonists were to build the new towns—receiving stations, hydroponics sheds, infirmaries, and so forth—and be paid for it in imports. Immigration would be stepped up accordingly, something that the Commission was very anxious to do, now that they had the ships to dump them in on us in quantity.

The old Jitterbug was about to take pioneer parties out to select sites and make plans—and both Hank and Sergei were going.

I wanted to go so bad I could taste it In the whole time I had been here I had never gotten fifty miles from Leda. Suppose somebody asked me what it was like on Ganymede when I got back on Earth? Truthfully, I wouldn't be able to tell them; I hadn't been any place.

I had had a chance, once, to make a trip to Barnard's Moon, as a temporary employee of Project Jove—and that hadn't worked out either. The twins. I stayed back and took care of the farm.

I talked it over with Dad.

"I hate to see you delay it any longer," he said seriously. I pointed out that it would be only two months.

"Hmmm—" he said. "Have you taken your merit badge tests yet?"

He knew I hadn't; I changed the subject by pointing out that Sergei and Hank were going.

"But they are both older than you are," he answered.

"Not by very much!"

"But I think they are each over the age limit they were looking for—and you are just under."

"Look, George," I protested, "rules were made to be broken. I've heard you say that There must be some spot I can fill—cook, maybe."

And that's just the job I got—cook.

I always have been a pretty fair cook—not in Mama Schultz's class, but good. The party had nothing to complain about on that score.

Captain Hattie put us down at a selected spot nine degrees north of the equator and longitude 113 west—that is to say, just out of sight of Jupiter on the far side and about thirty-one hundred miles from Leda. Mr. Hooker says that the average temperature of Ganymede will rise about nine degrees over the next century as more and more of the ancient ice melts—at which time Leda will be semi-tropical and the planet will be habitable half way to the poles. In the meantime colonies would be planted only at or near the equator.

I was sorry we had Captain Hattie as pilot; she is such an insufferable old scold. She thinks rocket pilots are a special race apart—supermen. At least she acts like it. Recently the Commission had forced her to take a relief pilot; there was just too much for one pilot to do. They had tried to force a check pilot on her, too—an indirect way to lead up to retiring her, but she was too tough for them. She threatened to take the Jitterbug up and crash it ... and they didn't dare call her bluff. At that time they were absolutely dependent on the Jitterbug.

Originally the Jitterbug's only purpose was for supply and passengers between Leda and the Project Jove station on Barnard's Moon—but that was back in the days when ships from Earth actually landed at Leda. Then the Mayflower came along and the Jitterbug was pressed into service as a shuttle. There was talk of another shuttle rocket but we didn't have it yet, which is why Captain Hattie had them where it hurt. The Commission had visions of a loaded ship circling Ganymede, just going round and round and round again, with no way to get down, like a kitten stuck up in a tree.

I'll say this for Hattie; she could handle her ship. I think she had nerve ends out in the skin of it. In clear weather she could even make a glide landing, in spite of our thin air. But I think she preferred to shake up her passengers with a jet landing.

She put us down, the Jitterbug took on more water mass, and away it bounced. She had three more parties to land. All in all the Jitterbug was servicing eight other pioneer parties. It would be back to pick us up in about three weeks.

The leader of our party was Paul du Maurier, who was the new assistant Scoutmaster of the Auslander troop and the chap who had gotten me taken on as cookie. He was younger than some of those working for him; furthermore, he shaved, which made him stand out like a white leghorn in a hog pen and made him look even younger. That is, he did shave, but he started letting his beard grow on this trip. "Better trim that grass," I advised him.

He said, "Don't you like my beard, Doctor Slop?" —that was a nickname he had awarded me for "Omnibus stew," my own invention. He didn't mean any harm by it.

I said, "Well, it covers your face, which is some help—but you might be mistaken for one of us colonial roughnecks. That wouldn't do for one of you high-toned Commission boys."

He smiled mysteriously and said, "Maybe that's what I want."

I said, "Maybe. But they'll lock you up in a zoo if you wear it back to Earth." He was due to go back for Earthside duty by the same trip I expected to make, via the Covered Wagon, two weeks after the end of the survey.

He smiled again and said, "Ah, yes, so they would," and changed the subject. Paul was one of the most thoroughly good guys I have ever met and smart as a whip as well. He was a graduate of South Africa University with P. G. on top of that at the System Institute on Venus—an ecologist, specializing in planetary engineering.

He handled that gang of rugged individualists without raising his voice. There is something about a real leader that makes it unnecessary for him to get tough.

But back to the survey—I didn't see much of it as I was up to my elbows in pots and pans, but I knew what was going on. The valley we were in had been picked from photographs taken from the Jitterbug; it was now up to Paul to decide whether or not it was ideally suited to easy colonization. It had the advantage of being in direct line-of-sight with power station number two, but that was not essential. Line-of-sight power relays could be placed anywhere on the mountains (no name, as yet) just south of us. Most of the new villages would have to have power relayed anyhow. Aside from a safety factor for the heat trap there was no point in setting up extra power stations when the whole planet couldn't use the potential of one mass-conversion plant.

So they got busy—an engineering team working on drainage and probable annual water resources, topographers getting a contour, a chemistry-agronomy team checking on what the various rock formations would make as soil, and a community architect laying out a town and farm and rocket port plot. There were several other specialists, too, like the mineralogist, Mr. Villa, who was doodlebugging the place for ores.

Paul was the "general specialist" who balanced all the data in his mind, fiddled with his slip stick, stared off into the sky, and came up with the over all answer. The over all answer for that valley was "nix"—and we moved on to the next one on the list, packing the stuff on our backs.

That was one of the few chances I got to look around. You see, we had landed at sunrise—about five o'clock Wednesday morning sunrise was, in that longitude—and the object was to get as much done as possible during each light phase. Jupiter light is all right for working in your own fields, but no good for surveying strange territory—and here we didn't even have Jupiter light—just Callisto, every other dark phase, every twelve-and-half days, to be exact. Consequently we worked straight through light phase, on pep pills.

Now a man who is on the pills will eat more than twice as much as a man who is sleeping regularly. You know, the Eskimos have a saying, "Food is sleep." I had to produce hot meals every four hours, around the clock. I had no time for sightseeing.

We got to camp number two, pitched our tents, I served a scratch meal, and Paul passed out sleeping pills. By then the Sun was down and we really died for about twenty hours. We were comfortable enough —spun glass pads under us and resin sealed glass canvas over us.

I fed them again, Paul passed out more sleepy pills, and back we went to sleep. Paul woke me Monday afternoon. This time I fixed them a light breakfast, then really spread myself to turn them out a feast. Everybody was well rested by now, and not disposed to want to go right back to bed. So I stuffed them.

After that we sat around for a few hours and talked. I got out my squeeze box—brought along by popular demand, that is to say, Paul suggested it—and gave 'em a few tunes. Then we talked some more.

They got to arguing about where life started and somebody brought up the old theory that the Sun had once been much brighter—Jock Montague, it was, the chemist. "Mark my words," he said, "When we get around to exploring Pluto, you'll find that life was there before us. Life is persistent, like mass-energy."

"Nuts," answered Mr. Villa, very politely. "Pluto isn't even a proper planet; it used to be a satellite of Neptune."

"Well, Neptune, then," Jock persisted. "Life is all through the universe. Mark my words—when the Jove Project straightens out the bugs and gets going, they'll even find life on the surface of Jupiter."

"On Jupiter?" Mr. Villa exploded. "Please, Jock! Methane and ammonia and cold as a mother-in-law's kiss. Don't joke with us. Why, there's not even light down under on the surface of Jupiter; it's pitch dark."

"Isaid it and I'll say it again," Montague answered. "Life is persistent. Wherever there is mass and energy with conditions that permit the formation of large and stable molecules, there you will find life. Look at Mars. Look at Venus. Look at Earth—the most dangerous planet of the lot. Look at the Ruined Planet."

I said, "What do you think about it, Paul?"

The boss smiled gently. "I don't. I haven't enough data."

"There!" said Mr. Villa. "There speaks a wise man. Tell me, Jock, how did you get to be an authority on this subject?"

"I have the advantage," Jock answered grandly, "of not knowing too much about the subject. Facts are always a handicap in philosophical debate."

That ended that phase of it, for Mr. Seymour, the boss agronomist, said, "I'm not so much worried about where life came from as where it is going—here."

"How?" I wanted to know. "In what way?"

"What are we going to make of this planet? We can make it anything we want. Mars and Venus—they had native cultures. We dare not change them much and we'll never populate them very heavily. These Jovian moons are another matter; it's up to us. They say man is endlessly adaptable. I say on the contrary that man doesn't adapt himself as much as he adapts his environment. Certainly we are doing so here. But how?"

"I thought that was pretty well worked out," I said. "We set up these new centers, more people come in and we spread out, same as at Leda."

"Ah, but where does it stop? We have three ships making regular trips now. Shortly there will be a ship in every three weeks, then it will be every week, then every day. Unless we are almighty careful there will be food rationing here, same as on Earth. Bill, do you know how fast the population is increasing, back Earthside?"

I admitted that I didn't

"More than one hundred thousand more persons each day than there were the day before. Figure that up."

I did. "That would be, uh, maybe fifteen, twenty shiploads a day. Still, I imagine they could build ships to carry them."

"Yes, but where would we put them? Each day, more than twice as many people landing as there are now on this whole globe. And not just on Monday, but on Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday—and the week and the month and the year after that, just to keep Earth's population stable. I tell you, it won't work. The day will come when we will have to stop immigration entirely." He looked around aggressively, like a man who expects to be contradicted.

He wasn't disappointed. Somebody said, "Oh, Seymour, come off it! Do you think you own this place just because you got here first? You snuck in while the rules were lax."

"You can't argue with mathematics," Seymour insisted. "Ganymede has got to be made self-sufficient as soon as possible—and then we've got to slam the door!"

Paul was shaking his head. "It won't be necessary."

"Huh?" said Seymour. "Why not? Answer me that. You represent the Commission: what fancy answer has the Commission got?"

"None," Paul told him. "And your figures are right but your conclusions are wrong. Oh, Ganymede has to be made self-sufficient, true enough, but your bogeyman about a dozen or more shiploads of immigrants a day you can forget."

"Why, if I may be so bold?"

Paul looked around the tent and grinned apologetically. "Can you stand a short dissertation on population dynamics? I'm afraid I don't have Jock's advantage; this is a subject I am supposed to know something about."

Somebody said, "Stand back. Give him air."

"Okay," Paul went on, "you brought it on yourselves. A lot of people have had the idea that colonization is carried on with the end purpose of relieving the pressure of people and hunger back on Earth. Nothing could be further from the truth."

I said. "Huh?"

"Bear with me. Not only is it physically impossible for a little planet to absorb the increase of a big planet, as Seymour pointed out, but there is another reason why well never get any such flood of people as a hundred thousand people a day—a psychological reason. There are never as many people willing to emigrate (even if you didn't pick them over) as there are new people born. Most people simply will not leave home. Most of them won't even leave their native villages, much less go to a far planet."

Mr. Villa nodded. "I go along with you on that The willing emigrant is an odd breed of cat. He's scarce."

"Right," Paul agreed. "But let's suppose for a moment that a hundred thousand people were willing to emigrate every day and Ganymede and the other colonies could take them. Would that relieve the situation back home—I mean "back Earthside'? The answer is, 'No, it wouldn't'."

He appeared to have finished. I finally said, "Excuse my blank look, Paul, but why wouldn't it?"

"Studied any bionomics, Bill?"

"Some."

"Mathematical population bionomics?"

"Well–no."

"But you do know that in the greatest wars the Earth ever had there were always more people after the war than before, no matter how many were killed. Life is not merely persistent, as Jock puts it; life is explosive. The basic theorem of population mathematics to which there has never been found an exception is that population increases always, not merely up to extent of the food supply, but beyond it, to the minimum diet that will sustain life—the ragged edge of starvation. In other words, if we bled off a hundred thousand people a day, the Earth's population would then grow until the increase was around two hundred thousand a day, or the bionomical maximum for Earth's new ecological dynamic."

Nobody said anything for a moment; there wasn't anything to say. Presently Sergei spoke up with, "You paint a grim picture, boss. What's the answer?"

Paul said, "There isn't any!"

Sergei said, "I didn't mean it that way. I mean, what is the outcome?"

When Paul did answer it was just one word, one monosyllable, spoken so softly that it would not have been heard if there had not been dead silence. What he said was:

"War."

There was a shuffle and a stir; it was an unthinkable idea. Seymour said, "Come now, Mr. du Maurier—I may be a pessimist, but I'm not that much of one. Wars are no longer possible."

Paul said, "So?"

Seymour answered almost belligerently, "Are you trying to suggest that the Space Patrol would let us down? Because that is the only way a war could happen."

Paul shook his head. "The Patrol won't let us down. But they won't be able to stop it. A police force is all right for stopping individual disturbances; it's fine for nipping things in the bud. But when the disturbances are planet wide, no police force is big enough, or strong enough, or wise enough. They'll try—they'll try bravely. They won't succeed."

"You really believe that?"

"It's my considered opinion. And not only my opinion, but the opinion of the Commission. Oh, I don't mean the political board; I mean the career scientists."

"Then what in tarnation is the Commission up to?"

"Building colonies. We think that is worthwhile in itself. The colonies need not be affected by the War. In fact, I don't think they will be, not much. It will be like America was up to the end of the nineteenth century; European troubles passed her by. I rather expect that the War, when it comes, will be of such size and duration that interplanetary travel will cease to be for a considerable period. That is why I said this planet has got to be self-sufficient. It takes a high technical culture to maintain interplanetary travel and Earth may not have it—after a bit."

I think Paul's ideas were a surprise to everyone present; I know they were to me. Seymour jabbed a finger at him, "If you believe this, then why are you going back to Earth? Tell me that."

Again Paul spoke softly. "I'm not. I'm going to stay here and become a 'steader."

Suddenly I knew why he was letting his beard grow.

Seymour answered, "Then you expect it soon." It was not a question; it was a statement.

"Having gone this far," Paul said hesitantly, "I'll give you a direct answer. War is not less than forty Earth years away, not more than seventy."

You could feel a sigh of relief all around the place. Seymour continued to speak for us, "Forty to seventy, you say. But that's no reason to homestead; you probably wouldn't live to see it. Not but what you'd make a good neighbor."

"I see this War," Paul insisted. "I know it's coming. Should I leave it up to my hypothetical children and grandchildren to outguess it? No. Here I rest. If I marry, I'll marry here. I'm not raising any kids to be radioactive dust."

It must have been about here that Hank stuck his head in the tent, for I don't remember anyone answering Paul. Hank had been outside on business of his own; now he opened the flap and called out, "Hey gents! Europa is up!"

We all trooped out to see. We went partly through embarrassment, I think; Paul had been too nakedly honest. But we probably would have gone anyhow. Sure, we saw Europa every day of our lives at home, but not the way we were seeing it now.

Since Europa goes around Jupiter inside Ganymede's orbit, it never gets very far away from Jupiter, if you call 39 degrees "not very far." Since we were 113 west longitude, Jupiter was 23 degrees below our eastern horizon—which meant that Europa, when it was furthest west of Jupiter, would be a maximum of 16 degrees above the true horizon.

Excuse the arithmetic. Since we had a row of high hills practically sitting on us to the east, what all this means is that, once a week, Europa would rise above the hills, just peeking over, hang there for about a day—then turn around and set in the east, right where it had risen. Up and down like an elevator.

If you've never been off Earth, don't tell me it's impossible. That's how it is—Jupiter and its moons do some funny things.

It was the first time it had happened this trip, so we watched it—a little silver boat, riding the hills like waves, with its horns turned up. There was argument about whether or not it was still rising, or starting to set again, and much comparing of watches. Some claimed to be able to detect motion but they weren't agreed on which way. After a while I got cold and went back in.

But I was glad of the interruption. I had a feeling that Paul had said considerably more than he had intended to and more than he would be happy to recall, come light phase. I blamed it on the sleeping pills. Sleeping pills are all right when necessary, but they tend to make you babble and tell your right name–treacherous things.